Re: foo?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Yeah, I know this has already been answered...

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 10:23:15AM -0700, Travis Davies wrote:
> What is foo? I've seen it before in source code, but I
> have never been able to figure out what it is.

I'm going to give these definitions in reverse order of what you'd
find by searching Dict (http://www.dict.org/):

  From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) : 

  metasyntactic variable n.     A name used in examples and
  understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random
  member of a class of things under discussion.  The word foo is the
  canonical example.  To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly
  ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything.
  In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a
  metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at
  any time.

     Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are
  variables in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc; (2) they
  are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages usages like
  "the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar").  However, it has
  been plausibly suggested that the real reason for the term "metasyntactic
  variable" is that it sounds good.

     To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables
   is a cultural signature.  They occur both in series (used for
  related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons.  Here are a
  few common signatures:

   foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...:
          MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to
          early versions of this lexicon!).  At MIT (but not at Stanford),
          baz dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A
          common recent mutation of this sequence inserts qux before
          quux.

   bazola, ztesch:
          Stanford (from mid-'70s on).

   foo, bar, thud, grunt:
          This series was popular at CMU.  Other CMU-associated variables
          include gorp.

   foo, bar, fum:
          This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.

   fred, jim, sheila, barney:
          See the entry for fred.  These tend to be Britishisms.

   corge, grault, flarp:
          Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.

   zxc, spqr, wombat:
          Cambridge University (England).

   shme
          Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres.  Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.

   foo, bar, baz, bongo
          Yale, late 1970s.

   spam, eggs
          Python programmers.

   snork
          Brown University, early 1970s.

   foo, bar, zot
          Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

   blarg, wibble
          New Zealand.

   toto, titi, tata, tutu
          France.

   pippo, pluto, paperino
          Italy.  Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the
          Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck.

   aap, noot, mies
          The Netherlands.  These are the first words a child used to
          learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board.

   oogle, foogle, boogle; zork, gork, bork
          These two series (which may be continued with other initial
          consonents) are reportedly common in England, and said to go
          back to Lewis Carroll.

     Of all these, only `foo' and `bar' are universal (and baz
  nearly so).  The compounds foobar and `foobaz' also enjoy very wide
  currency.

     Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and
  mumble, for example.

     See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous
  metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

And foo specifically...

  From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) : 

  foo /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust.  2. [very common] Used
  very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp.  programs
  and files (esp. scratch files).  3. First on the standard list of
  metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples.  See also bar,
  baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred,
  plugh, xyzzy, thud.

     When `foo' is used in connection with `bar' it has generally
  traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond
  All Repair'), later modified to foobar.  Early versions of the Jargon
  File interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now
  seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps
  influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have
  been the _original_ form.

     For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar
  history in comic strips and cartoons.  The earliest documented uses were
  in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip popular in the 1930s, which frequently
  included the word "foo".  Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled
  it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense
  phrases such as "Notary Sojac" and "1506 nix nix".  According to the
  Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion (http://www.spumco.com/magazine/eowbcc/)
  Holman claimed to have found the word "foo" on the bottom of a Chinese
  figurine.  This is plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic
  inscriptions, and this may have been the Chinese word `fu' (sometimes
  transliterated `foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the
  proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese
  restaurants are properly called "fu dogs").  English speakers' reception
  of Holman's `foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddish
  `feh' and English `fooey' and `fool'.

     Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode
  on two wheels.        The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late
  1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced an
  operable version of Holman's Foomobile.  According to the Encyclopedia of
  American Comics, `Foo' fever swept the U.S., finding its way into popular
  songs and generating over 500 `Foo Clubs.'  The fad left `foo' references
  embedded in popular culture (including a couple of appearances in Warner
  Brothers cartoons of 1938-39) but with their origins rapidly forgotten.

     One place they are known to have remained live is in the U.S.
  military during the WWII years.  In 1944-45, the term `foo fighters'
  was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious
  trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced in
    popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better
  grunge-rock bands).  Informants connected the term to the Smokey Stover
  strip.

     The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms
  during the war (see kluge and kludge for another important example)
  Period sources reported that `FOO' became a semi-legendary subject of WWII
  British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to the American Kilroy.
  Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO was here" or something
  similar showed up.  Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably
  came from Forward Observation Officer, but this (like the contemporaneous
  "FUBAR") was probably a backronym .  Forty years later, Paul Dickson's
  excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo"
  to an unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows:
  "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter
  omniscience and sarcasm."

     Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that
  hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of
  a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles
  and Robert Crumb.  Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later
  became one of the most important and influential artists in underground
  comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later
  burned most of the existing copies in disgust.        The title FOO was
  featured in large letters on the front cover.  However, very few copies
  of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's `oeuvre'
  have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey
  Stover comics.        The Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-liv
ed
  Canadian parody magazine named `Foo' published in 1951-52.

     An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the
  TMRC Language", compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went something
  like this:

    FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME
    HUM."  Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.

     (For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC.)  This
  definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, only then two decades old
  and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a ha ha
  only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism.  Today's hackers
  would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like that, and it
  is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible.  Almost the entire staff
  of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word
  spread from there.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/
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